Where everybody wentJan. 12, 2012
 part 1 of 3 parts. Click here for part
2 and part 3

By Ed Zotti

I meant to write this piece six months ago,
when I suppose it might have been a little timelier. I didn't. Sue me. The
subject is the future of Chicago, which I venture to say has its points of
interest even now.

Specifically,
I want to explore the 2010 census results
 looking not just at the dull numbers but at maps cobbled together from
the data using various miracles of modern technology. I'm not the first to
publish Chicago census maps, but as far as I know these are the first to
give a comprehensive picture of what happened during a tumultuous decade.
Fair warning: you have to be a serious data geek to get into this sort of
thing. But for those with the patience for it, the maps tell a
fascinating story, about a town that simultaneously revived and collapsed.
More important, they give a glimpse at what will happen next.

Let's review where we are.

I
was as surprised as anyone last February when the census bureau reported
that Chicago's population had fallen by more than 200,000 over the preceding
decade, and as skeptical of the initial theories about why. A sizable
fraction of the black community had bailed, that was clear, but to say this
was "part
of the great reverse migration to the South," as one think-tank
demographer was quoted as saying  get out. I'd heard nothing at
that point about any such migration; surely a simpler explanation, I
thought, was the razing of the city's high-rise public housing projects. In
any case, early reports indicated the drastic population loss had been
confined to a single ethnic group, making it possible to believe the rest of
the city had been more or less stable.

Followup
stories suggested that was wishful thinking. Although downtown had grown,
the Tribune reported, "vast swaths" of the city had not
 in fact, 57
of Chicago's 77 neighborhoods had lost people. (A later
article upped that to 60 of 77.) The increase in Hispanics,
which had been the driving force behind the city's growth during the 1990s,
had dropped to an anemic 3 percent. Neighborhoods such as Englewood were emptying
out.

Here
was troubling news. Chicago had been congratulating
itself on having avoided the fate of cities like Cleveland and Detroit. What
with the housing boom, downtown
especially, plus projects like Millennium
Park, the town gave the appearance of having turned the
corner. The census report called that into question. Had the apparent
prosperity been an illusion, masking a long-term decline? More pointedly,
given the sputtering economy and occasional frightening crime reports, was
the bottom about to fall out? I decided to find out.

I got some free mapmaking
software, base
maps from the census bureau, and a half-century's worth of census data
from a venture called Social
Explorer, which had done the same for the New
York Times. Getting all this stuff to work together took some doing.
Then I started sifting the data and making some maps, the more revealing of
which are shown here. The tale took a while to emerge and is unavoidably
complicated and at times depressing. But bear with me. There's some good
news, too.

We
pick up the story where the media left it last year: the revelation that much of
the city, not just the poorest neighborhoods, lost population
between 2000 and 2010. The map at the top of the page vividly illustrates
this (red/yellow = loss, blue = gain).

The
only parts of the city that gained significant numbers of people (darkest blue)
were the central area and scattered outlying districts. These were greatly
outnumbered by the parts that lost lots of people (darkest red).
What's more, the big losers were spread throughout the city and included north
and northwest side neighborhoods that to all appearances were thriving. What was
up with that?

One
obvious explanation was that, as communities become more
affluent, large working-class families are replaced by smaller
middle-class ones. Other things being equal, falling population in such
neighborhoods doesn't mean decline; just the opposite. The more
relevant statistic isn't
the trend in population but rather in households. Changing some parameters,
I generated two more maps:

Follow STRAIGHT DOPE CHICAGO on
twitter, assuming Little Ed remembers
to send the feeds out, and if nothing else observe his fumblings with a
technology that is obviously beyond him.

The
map on the left shows population loss in percentage terms. The map on
the right shows the
percentage change in households.

This
latter
map puts matters in a different light. Red is much less prominent, blue more so. We see
that much of the population loss throughout the city is the result of smaller
households, a long-term, nationwide trend not reflective of the
city's fortunes. What's more, household growth has been strong throughout
the urban core
 not just downtown and on the north side, but to a surprising extent on
the west and south sides as well.

I'll
get back to that. First, though, we need to look at the neighborhoods that
lost population and households, and why.

The loss of
households in affluent neighborhoods on the north lakefront is a little puzzling
at first. I couldn't think of a good way to get at a definitive answer using
census data, but I think the explanation in part is consolidation of small
apartments into larger ones. I know of at least one large building where this
happened, and in Ravenswood where I live I know of a fair number of two-flats
that were converted into single family homes. This bespeaks prosperity, not
decline.

That explanation
won't fly in other parts of the city. Initial news accounts indicated the big
population losses were in
the black community, and if we look at the city totals, we see that was
certainly true
 the steep drop in the number of African-Americans accounted for more
than 90
percent of the city's total decrease:

Many large U.S.
cities lost black people between 2000 and 2010, but Chicago was conspicuous in
this respect
 it lost more black people than anywhere except Detroit:

BLACK
POPULATION CHANGE, U.S. CITIES WITH MOST BLACK PEOPLE

City

2010

2000

Change

% Change

New York

1,861,295

1,962,154

100,859

5%

Chicago

872,286

1,053,803

181,587

17%

Philadelphia

644,287

646,123

1,836

0%

Detroit

586,573

771,966

185,393

24%

Houston

485,956

487,851

1,895

0%

Memphis

408,075

397,732

10,343

3%

Baltimore

392,938

417,009

24,071

6%

Los Angeles

347,380

401,986

54,606

14%

Washington, D.C.

301,053

340,088

39,035

11%

Dallas

294,159

304,824

10,665

3%

Black =
non-Hispanic black. Source: U.S. Census, table QT-P6

Why so many? At first I had the naive thought it was because of
high-rise public housing demolition. I generated a map showing the change
in black population throughout the city, thinking it might show hot spots at
former CHA sites. For comparison, I also created a map showing black
population change in the 1990s:

No hot spots were apparent in the 2010 map. On the contrary, black people had
pulled out of enormous tracts on the west and south sides. What's more, unlike in the past,
losses in one section of town hadn't been offset to any great extent by
gains
elsewhere in the city. During the 1990s, as the map on the left shows, the
black population of neighborhoods such as Rogers Park, South Chicago, and
Chicago Lawn had increased substantially. That was less true this time around.
Many black
Chicagoans had simply left town.

Where
had they gone
 to the suburbs? No doubt some did, but judging from the census numbers,
most didn't. The overall U.S. black population increased 11 percent between
2000 and 2010; if black people in metropolitan Chicago increased at the same
rate but simply moved from the city to the suburbs, there should have been
1.7 million of them in the metropolitan area as of 2010.

There weren't. The number of black people in metro Chicago actually
decreased. In fact, when you went through the numbers for all of Illinois,
you were obliged to conclude that 227,000 black people had left the state
altogether. Aaron Renn, a Chicago urban affairs writer who blogs at urbanophile.com, tells
me the largest net recipient of outmigration from Cook County was Fulton
County, Georgia, where Atlanta is located. That's not to say everybody
headed south, as the headlines would have you believe; in a recent
post, Renn points out that smaller northern cities such as Indianapolis, Columbus, and Minneapolis-St. Paul all
saw significant increases in black population. It was the big cities like
Chicago, New York, Detroit, and, interestingly, Los Angeles that saw the
largest drops.

Wherever
black Chicagoans may have gone, the impact on the city they left behind is
all too evident.
The two maps below compare
Chicago's population density
in 1980 and 2010:

Here's as stark a
contrast as you'll find in any major city in the United States. The south and west
sides have been drained of people. The north side, on the other hand, doesn't look
dramatically different, and downtown has flourished. The old idea that Chicago is two cities, a rich one and
a poor one, has never been truer than now. We'll take a look at closer look at
both in the next installment.